Most of you will be familiar with Silicon Graphics, Inc., once the proud leader in the graphics workstations market with their high-end MIPS workstations, running the UNIX System V based IRIX operating system. The company has been in steady decline for a long time now, and two years ago it put an end to its MIPS product line, favouring processors from Intel. Back to IRIX - it has many assets and good features (XFS, for instance), and the IRIX Interactive Desktop was certainly one of them. Sadly, it never properly made its way out of IRIX, but this is now being worked on, with the full support from SGI.

I am not terribly thrilled though. i can think of a lot of interfaces that i liked more that would be considered unique. NEXT's interface, BeOS's interface, os/2's interface, QNX's Photon interface, actualy there are quite a bit of others. admitidly i never did get a chance to use IRIX, I did used ot use Maya but it was never on an SGI machine.

so since most of the site is still under construction, can someone tell me what makes this interfact so unique that it is worth bringing into the modern world? is apears to be a Motif looking interface like CDE from the screen shots. any IRIX experts here that can highlight some of IRIX Interactive Desktop's unique and exciting features for me?

I think this quote from the screenshot page explains it. It is about performance, not about style.

"Here is a recent screen shot from a QuadCore x86_64 bit Ubuntu 8.041 system running MaXX Desktop DR2 with a NVidia Quadro 1700FX. What is amazing to notice on that system is that no CPU is used when interacting with the 5Dwm window manager. Even when XComposite and our XCompMgr composition manager is enabledâ¦ This is really what MaXX Desktop is all aboutâ¦."

I am on the the same side of the fence as the others wondering what the fuss is all about.
Is someone serious/game enough to tell us all that a quad core machine will perform worse with the other hundred window managers like fluxbox/blackbox/wmaker etc that look similar and have similar goals? Would anyone tell the difference? Even on a P4?? There better be more to it than performance because nostalgia isn't going to cut it with me.

For me it's not so much about the performance though that is important. Some folks like gnome, some folks like kde, some folks like tiling wm's and some folks like using a different *box window manager every few weeks. Me, I like CDE and the Indigo Magic desktop. I don't see a lot of fuss about it but a few of us geeks are excited about this project. I think this is really cool and I'm happy it's out there and supported by SGI. It also helps the Indigo Magic experience to live on and not die off with IRIX. And last but certainly not least, a little more variety and choice is always a good thing.

I really like the idea of a very snappy lightweigt full desktop environment - i.e. a fast powerful lightweight version of GNOME ,KDE or Xface .

I hope for them ,that there is a demand for what they are offering & developing .

They talk of high reliability - I do not know how SGI put IRIX together - but the reliability of this new desktop environment also depends on the reliability of the X Window System ,the drivers & the rest of the kernel .. etc. .

These three parts of the system are currently not developed with ultimate reliabilty & snappyness in mind ,which SGI on IRIX had more control of .

Looks like mix of Awesome and KDE for me.
I really don't see anything on screeenshots except of ten-year-old aestetic and mess of icons on desktop.
IceWM is far cooler for "lightweight wm with icons" niche.
It's nice to have just another WM, though

The thing that most of us like about MaXX, is that it isn't flashy, it's simple and it's fast. Plus, MaXX is GPU accelerated, not GPU enhanced like OS X, or Vista. It uses the GPU to off load the graphics processing from the CPU, not to add eye candy that ends up making the whole system just as slow as a non-GPU version.

As far as I'm aware all major modern window managers and toolkit offload operations in various degrees to the gpu.

The fact that they are using a compositing manager suggests that they too want a certain degree of "enhancing", because compositing involves extra operations so it will be slower than drawing pixmaps directly to the frame buffer. What compositing does is that makes it appear smoother i.e. no flashing when pixmaps update or pixmap tearing (because textures are updated off screen and then shown).

Looks like a good alternative for people who want something the looks good but uses very low resources. I hope that they eventually switch to a more standard licsense that allows for use on systems other than x86 Linux and that they stop distributing stuff with binary blobs and go "all open" but as it stands, it's a pretty good thing.

My conclusion: Linux is too much diversified, focusing the engagement of all this briliant (or less briliant but still motivated^^) programmers could fix the gap between linux and end user requirements. What I see in project like that is just the ego of the developers who want to show off, that they will do it better (again...). Kind of penis envy, isn't it? ;-)